[ale] Latency on my DSL line

[James Sumners]

For the most part I am going to have to agree with you. But there are
still some people working there that are knowledgeable, able, and
willing to help. Sadly, they have acquired some script monkeys that
you have to work around.

I live a quarter mile off the road and the line to my modem is about
100 feet long. So my signal isn't very good. I'm getting about 2Mb/sec
down on a good day. Still, I've been having too many problems myself.
As I was composing this message I ran the speedtest.net test and got
about 400Kb/sec, at best. Horrible.

If you want to write your own speed test, you could host a file on
known to be fast connection and download the file like such:

/usr/bin/time -p curl -o /dev/null
"http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/196444main_07pd3155_full.jpg" -s
2>tmp.out

You can then read the number of seconds it took to download the file
and divide that into the known bytes of the file. That should give you
how many bytes per second was downloaded. E.G. the file I used on
NASA's site is 522,886 bytes. On my last test, it took 9.85 seconds to
download. So I got 522886/9.85 = 53084.87 bytes/sec or 51 KB/sec
(53084.87/1024).

Clearly, a larger file will give a better sample.

On 11/7/07, List <lst at wiencko.net> wrote:
> Speedfactory has been having some bizzare problems in the past few
> days.  I had a brief outage (brief for them... about 15 minutes) and
> called them.  The brain damaged customer service rep told me the usual
> things - power cycle and reboot everything, and so on.  Of course, I had
> already done that.  Then, while he was busy getting help from somebody
> who knows something, the network came back.  He claimed it was the power
> cycling that fixed the problem (not).
>
> The rest of the day the network degraded until around 10PM it was
> essentially unusable.   Using Speedtest.Net (the best speed tester I've
> found so far) I was getting 700ms pings and 240Kbs (yes, K) download
> throughput.   Called them back and got the same moron... er... CS rep,
> who said they in fact were having an "intermittent" problem and had no
> idea if or when it would get fixed.  About an hour and a half later the
> network came back.
>
> I don't know if you can invoke Speedtest.net's server via anything
> except their rather snazzy Javascript web page, but it might be worth
> looking into.
>
> I've seen a lot of this type of problem lately.  It is not necessarily a
> nighttime problem, but starts with an outage of some sort, then degraded
> service for 12-48 hours.  Speedfactory has no idea that there is a
> problem, what the problem may be, or when if ever somebody will fix the
> problem.  I have been told (over the several dozen calls I have had with
> them in the past year or so) that my router was bad, modem fried, or
> house wiring defective.  I finally got annoyed enough to buy a
> replacement router and modem, which I keep configured and on the shelf
> able to switch out at a moment's notice to show them that the problem is
> not my equipment or network.
>
> Speedfactory used to be the best service and offered a competitive
> price.  They have fallen rapidly in reliability and bottomed out in
> customer service over the past year or so.  Pity, as there don't really
> seem to be any viable alternatives.
>
> Tom
>
> Christopher Fowler wrote:
> > Lately I've been seeing slowness at night on my DSL line (SpeedFactory).
> > I assume that for normal people that use the web 99% of the time this
> > would not bee seen.  I use SSH most of the time.  Around 7pm typing on
> > remote systems becomes a pain due to latency.  My wife has complained
> > that the ABC and Disney sites that play videos are choppy.
> > dslspeedtest.com does not show good things either at night.  BellSouth
> > has done some testing and see no packet loss.  I'm not sure how they are
> > doing that.
> >
> > My idea is to run a program in linux and in linux at our data center to
> > do a test between the two machines.  I will take that output and place
> > it in a rrd file and I can graph what is going on.  Any ideas on what
> > program to use?  I need text output so I can parse the values via perl.
> >
> > Chris
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59